He Said/She Said: A Novel

In the summer of 1999, Kit and Laura travel to a festival in Cornwall to see a total eclipse of the sun. Kit is an eclipse chaser; Laura has never seen one before. Young and in love, they are certain this will be the first of many they'll share. But in the hushed moments after the shadow passes, Laura interrupts a man and a woman. She knows that she saw something terrible. The man denies it. It is her word against his.

Cut to the Bone

Ruby is a vlogger, a rising star of YouTube and a heroine to millions of teenage girls. And she's missing.... But she's an adult - nothing to worry about, surely. Until the video's uploaded...Ruby, in the dirt, pleading for her life. Enter Detective Inspector Kate Riley: the Met's rising star and the head of a new team of investigators with the best resources money can buy. Among them Detective Sergeant Zain Harris, the poster boy for multiracial policing. But can Kate wholly trust him? And, more importantly, can she trust herself around him?

Safe with Me: A psychological thriller so tense it will take your breath away

Thirteen years ago someone did something very bad to Anna. Now it's her turn to get even. Anna lives a solitary existence, taking solace in order and routine. Her only friend is the lonely old lady next door. She doesn't like to let people to get too close - she knows how much damage they can do. Then one ordinary day, Anna witnesses a devastating road accident and recognises the driver as Carla, the woman who ruined her life all those years ago.

The Child

As an old house is demolished in a gentrifying section of London, a workman discovers a tiny skeleton, buried for years. For journalist Kate Waters, it's a story that deserves attention. She cobbles together a piece for her newspaper, but at a loss for answers, she can only pose a question: Who is the Building Site Baby? As Kate investigates, she unearths connections to a crime that rocked the city decades earlier: A newborn baby was stolen from the maternity ward in a local hospital and was never found.

The Lying Game: A Novel

On a cool June morning, Isa Wilde, a resident of the seemingly idyllic coastal village of Salten, is walking her dog along a tidal estuary. Before she can stop him, Isa's dog charges into the water to retrieve what first appears to be a wayward stick - and to her horror, Isa discovers it's not a stick at all...but a human bone. As her three best friends from childhood converge in Salten to comfort a seriously shaken-up Isa, terrifying discoveries are made, and their collective history slowly unravels.

Without Trace: A Morgan Vine Thriller

A gripping psychological thriller for fans of Gone Girl and Making a Murderer. For four long years, journalist Morgan Vine has campaigned for the release of her childhood sweetheart Danny Kilcannon - convicted, on dubious evidence, of murdering his 14 year-old stepdaughter. When a key witness recants, Danny is released from prison. With nowhere else to go, he relies on single mum Morgan and her teenage daughter, Lissa.

Sister Sister: A truly absorbing psychological thriller

Alice: beautiful, kind, manipulative, liar. Clare: intelligent, loyal, paranoid, jealous. Clare thinks Alice is a manipulative liar who is trying to steal her life. Alice thinks Clare is jealous of her long-lost return and place in their family. One of them is telling the truth. The other is a maniac. Two sisters. One truth.

The Darkest Lies: A Gripping Psychological Thriller with a Shocking Twist

Melanie Oak appeared to have the perfect life. Married to her childhood sweetheart, Jacob, the couple live with their beautiful, loving, teenage daughter, Beth, in a pretty village. Nothing can shake her happiness -- until the day that Beth goes missing, and is discovered beaten almost to the point of death, her broken body lying in a freezing creek on the marshes near their home. Consumed with grief, Melanie is determined to find her daughter's attacker. Someone in the village must have seen something. Why won't they talk?

Never Look Back: DI Mike Lockyer, Book 1

Three women have been found brutally murdered in south London, the victims only feet away from help during each sadistic attack. And the killer is getting braver.... Sarah Grainger is rapidly becoming too afraid to leave her house. Once an outgoing photographer, she knows that someone is watching her. A cryptic note brings everything into terrifying focus, but it’s the chilling phone calls that take the case to another level. DI Mike Lockyer heads up the regional murder squad. With three bodies on his watch, and a killer growing in confidence, he frantically tries to find the link between these seemingly isolated incidents.

The Cleaner

Pools of blood, scenes of carnage, signs of agonising death - who deals with the aftermath of violence once the bodies have been taken away? Judith Kepler has seen it all. She is a crime-scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner. It is at the home of a woman who has been brutally murdered that she is suddenly confronted with her own past. The murder victim knew Judith's secret: as a child Judith was sent to an orphanage under mysterious circumstances - parentage unknown.

The Widow

When the police started asking questions, Jean Taylor turned into a different woman. One who enabled her and her husband to carry on when more bad things began to happen... But that woman's husband died last week. And Jean doesn't have to be her anymore. There's a lot Jean hasn't said over the years about the crime her husband was suspected of committing. She was too busy being the perfect wife, standing by her man while living with the accusing glares and the anonymous harassment.

The Life I Left Behind

Everyone tells her she's a survivor. No one knows she's dead inside. Six years ago Melody Pieterson was attacked and left for dead. She coped by locking away her memories, burying herself. The man responsible was caught and convicted. Even his release from jail won't derail her new life. She's a survivor after all. Then the body of another woman is discovered in identical circumstances. Like Melody, she has blond hair and green eyes. Like Melody she is found holding a gold bird cage chain.

The Girl in the Ice: Detective Erika Foster Crime Thriller, Book 1

When a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation. The victim, a beautiful young socialite, appeared to have the perfect life. Yet when Erika begins to dig deeper, she starts to connect the dots between the murder and the killings of three prostitutes, all found strangled, hands bound, and dumped in water around London.

The Fire Child

The perfect husband. The perfect stepson. The perfect lie? When Rachel marries dark, handsome David, everything seems to fall into place. Swept from single life in London to the beautiful Carnhallow House in Cornwall, she gains wealth, love, and an affectionate stepson, Jamie. But then Jamie's behavior changes, and Rachel's perfect life begins to unravel.

The Secrets She Keeps: A Novel

Agatha is pregnant and works part time stocking shelves at a grocery store in a ritzy London suburb, counting down the days until her baby is due. As the hours of her shifts creep by in increasing discomfort, the one thing she looks forward to at work is catching a glimpse of Meghan, the effortlessly chic customer whose elegant lifestyle dazzles her. Meghan has it all: two perfect children, a handsome husband, a happy marriage, and a stylish group of friends, and she writes perfectly droll confessional posts on her popular parenting blog.

I See You

Every morning and evening, Zoe Walker takes the same route to the train station, waits at a certain place on the platform, finds her favorite spot in the car, never suspecting that someone is watching her. It all starts with a classified ad. During her commute home one night, while glancing through her local paper, Zoe sees her own face staring back at her - a grainy photo along with a phone number and a listing for a website called FindTheOne.com.

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely 15-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from - a place to which she vowed she'd never return.

The Killer Next Door

Everyone who lives at 23 Beulah Grove has a secret. If they didn't, they wouldn't be renting rooms in a dodgy old building for cash - no credit check, no lease. It's the kind of place you end up when you you've run out of other options.The six residents mostly keep to themselves, but one unbearably hot summer night, a terrible accident pushes them into an uneasy alliance. What they don't know is that one of them is a killer. He's already chosen his next victim, and he'll do anything to protect his secret.

Behind Her Eyes: A Novel

Louise is a single mom, a secretary, stuck in a modern-day rut. On a rare night out, she meets a man in a bar, and sparks fly. Though he leaves after they kiss, she's thrilled she finally connected with someone. When Louise arrives at work on Monday, she meets her new boss, David. The man from the bar. The very married man from the bar...who says the kiss was a terrible mistake but who still can't keep his eyes off Louise.

The Shark: Forgotten Files, Book 1

At the grisly murder scene of a teen prostitute, Virginia state trooper Riley Tatum's past roars back to haunt her. When she was a teenage runaway, she was kidnapped, drugged, and left unconscious on the streets. She has no memories of what happened, only strange recurring dreams of two men playing cards. Former FBI agent Clay Bowman, Riley's old flame, is Shield Security's newest member. He's plagued by the unsolved case of a serial killer nicknamed the Shark who murdered girls as part of a sadistic poker game.

While You Were Sleeping

Tara Logan adores her perfect little family: husband, Noah, and two children, teenager Rosie and 11-year-old Spencer. But her happiness is shattered when she wakes in her neighbour Lee Jacobs' bed, with no memory of how she got there or what happened between them. And worse - he has been stabbed to death. Convinced she didn't kill Lee, Tara flees home and stays silent, holding her breath as the investigation grips the neighbourhood.

The Memory Watcher

When Autumn Carpenter stumbles upon the social media account of the family who adopted her infant daughter years ago, she finds herself instantly drawn into their picture-perfect existence. From behind a computer screen, Autumn watches Grace's every memory, from birthdays to holidays to bedtime snuggles. But what starts as an innocent fascination soon spirals into an addictive obsession that comes to a screeching halt the day the McMullen family closes their Instaface account.

The Sleeper

A tense, gripping psychological thriller, with Hitchcockian overtones, perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn, Sophie Hannah and Rosamund Lupton. Lara Finch is living a lie. Everyone thinks she has a happy life in Cornwall, married to the devoted Sam, but in fact she is desperately bored. When she is offered a new job that involves commuting to London by sleeper train, she meets Guy and starts an illicit affair. But then Lara vanishes from the night train without a trace.

The Woman Next Door

Two suburban women. Two dark secrets. The almost perfect murder. Everybody needs good neighbours.... Melissa and Hester have lived next door to each other for years. When Melissa's daughter was younger, Hester was almost like a grandmother to her. But recently they haven't been so close. Hester has plans to change all that. It's obvious to her that despite Melissa's outwardly glamorous and successful life, she needs Hester's help.

Publisher's Summary

Original, haunting and utterly gripping, Kiss Me First is The Talented Mr Ripley for the online age and the literary thriller that everyone will be talking about.

Leila has never met Tess, but she now knows more about Tess than anyone in the world. She’s read all of her emails, researched her past and asked Tess for every detail about her friends and family. Tess has never met Leila. But if she wants to slip away from the world unnoticed, she needs to trust Leila with her life.

At first, Leila finds it easy to assume Tess’s identity, and no one has any reason to distrust her. But as Leila is soon to discover, there is much more to a person than the facts and there are things about life you can learn only by living it…

For fans of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson and Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, Lottie Moggach’s Kiss Me First is an electrifying and unputdownable debut from a phenomenally gifted storyteller.

This is definitely a novel that lives up to the hype! Forget 'Gone Girl' - this is even better! I listened to this over 2 days on holiday and was absolutely gripped by it. The best audiobook I have listened to this year and I feel bereft now that it's finished. I did not guess where this was going and was mesmerised by the story, the character of Leila and the narration. It was the first time I had heard Imogen Church narrate and really wasn't sure at first. However, she narrated this book perfectly and made every character completely believable. Outstanding.

14 of 15 people found this review helpful

Nicola

London, United Kingdom

7/24/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"What am I supposed to listen to now?"

Where does Kiss Me First rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Very high, I found it very easy to get into and soon I was taken in by the twisting, turning plot. It is scary it is how much information is out there on the internet about everyone. Yet still people continue to add more and more information about there lives, work and views. Just as I am now.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Apart from Leila, definitely Jonty. They are certainly an odd couple, Lottie Moggach and Imogen Church conjure up a great picture of these two polar opposites living is a small, onion smelling apartment. His breezy attitude to life, his sense of grabbing life is so different to Leila's closeted online view.

What does Imogen Church bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?

From Leila's perspective, Imogen creates a voice for Leila that allows you to easily slip into her computer generated world.Also, am impressed with the seamless accent changes between American, English and Welsh. Imogen manages to give each character a distinct voice without over doing it.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes - the tube journey for once wasn't long enough.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Robin

Caloundra, Australia

7/9/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"A great first novel"

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I enjoyed this page turner but felt it had a few minor flaws in the story line.

What did you like best about this story?

It's an interesting scenario and the main character Leila was quite believable. Beautifully read and the accents were true.,

Have you listened to any of Imogen Church’s other performances? How does this one compare?

No

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes and almost did!

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Claire

SALFORD, United Kingdom

11/7/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"Original story"

What did you like most about Kiss Me First?

I really enjoyed listening to Kiss me first last summer. <br/>The narrator had a pleasant voice and it felt true to the characters. <br/>The story was gripping and kept me going until the end.<br/>I have already recommended it to friends for its originality, it's well written. I wish there more entertaining books like this one. <br/><br/>

What was one of the most memorable moments of Kiss Me First?

I really liked when the main character went to meet the guy at his work place and confronted him only to see that what you might get from behind the screen might not be what it really is in the real world.

Which scene did you most enjoy?

On the way to meet the man in the train. The main character sees the headline about the boss from the website who recruited her about him being on the run.

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

That's a good question but I'm afraid I don't know.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

H Ireland

Ireland

5/21/14

Overall

Performance

Story

"Very disappointing overall."

What was most disappointing about Lottie Moggach’s story?

The basic idea and creativity behind this book was excellent but the story line was pointless in the end I was left to feel like I had gotten lost and ended up back at the start having learned nothing. there was huge potential for this to have been a brilliant book but unfortunately it was not to be I'm afraid.

Would you be willing to try another one of Imogen Church’s performances?

Leila is one of life's innocents, someone who doesn't quite fit in and sees life in her own way. Having recently lost her mother for whom she had been caring, she is drawn in to assuming an identity for someone who doesn't want her life anymore. This is the story of someone who lives too much on the internet, avoiding real human contact. I don't want to give too much of the story away, but you keep reading this book to find out what actually happened. The web gets more entangled but at the end it is left for you to decide. The book is well written and although at first I did not like the way the narrator was reading, I realised it was right for the character of Leila. I read this on holiday and it kept my interest well. Recommended.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Mazalicious

United Kingdom

5/18/14

Overall

Performance

Story

"Disturbing"

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

The narrator definitely- she was really good and captured the characters very well.

If you’ve listened to books by Lottie Moggach before, how does this one compare?

I haven't listened to any other Lottie Moggach books

Which character – as performed by Imogen Church – was your favourite?

Tess - her eccentric personality was captured exceptionally well by the narrator

Did Kiss Me First inspire you to do anything?

On the basis of this experience I'd be interested to hear other books read by Imogen Church. Less motivated to read another book by Lottie Moggach

Any additional comments?

The theme of the book was very depressing/ dispiriting. Without wishing to give anything away (so I won't go into detail), the circumstances of both main characters was sad, although in different ways. So at times the book had rather a morbid feel.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Linda

Hastings, United Kingdom

3/2/14

Overall

Performance

Story

"Depressing"

If this book wasn’t for you, who do you think might enjoy it more?

Not sure maybe someone interested in disturbed personalities

Has Kiss Me First put you off other books in this genre?

Yes

How could the performance have been better?

It is the story that let's it down perhaps a bit of editing as the listener feels a bit bludgeoned by the repetition

What character would you cut from Kiss Me First?

There are very few characters so it would not be possible to. It any

Any additional comments?

The story concept is good but it is a bit depressing and the main character is not very well drawn.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

LondonCityMum

London, UK

7/12/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"slightly bizarre"

The story is unfolding very slowly, and I had to go back the first three chapters again and again as I missed some seemingly important bits which made me fail to understand the jump from London to Spain, past to present.Having said that, there were very interesting bits in there too, the whole storyline with Connor seemed to present itself as a plot with more potential but ended quite abruptly. Equally, the resolution appeared a tad rushed. All in all, a slightly bizarre book with moments of truth and insight, but a rather unsatisfactory final chapter I felt.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

L Smith

Totteridge, United Kingdom

11/1/14

Overall

Performance

Story

"Utterly Dull and Never-ending!"

What disappointed you about Kiss Me First?

I hate giving up on a book and I nearly did after Part 1 but I felt that it had to get better! Surely?! But it never did! The main protagonist is dull, morose and very 1-dimensional and there nothing actually happens - there is no action, no tale just one person's musings. The book is ENTIRELY summed up in the blurb, there REALLY is nothing more to it!

What could Lottie Moggach have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Added a plot line that extended beyond the initial concept.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Imogen Church's voice suited the character but because the characters were so morose, so was the voice. There was not a particularly significant variant in the voices of the different characters. I suppose maybe if the main character voice had had a little more bounce it might have made this book a little less dull.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Kiss Me First?

All the scenes in the hippy commune, they were pointless, the main character could have equally been in her bedroom to re-tell the "story".

Any additional comments?

Don't listen to this book if you are in any way unhappy - it will only enhance gloom, not lighten or distract you from it!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

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